Water, Paper, Stone by Judy O'Shea, reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Water, Paper, Stone

Judy O’Shea

In 1991 Judy left her job as a senior executive in the USA for a sabbatical year with her husband Mike, who had taken early retirement at 51 to fulfill a lifelong dream to become an artist.  They made a bucket list and one of the items on it was to spend time in Europe and learn another language.  After several false starts, they found themselves in the south of France in the Haut Languedoc on a touring holiday and fell in love with a village on the Tarn river.

Back in the states and ready to go back to work, Judy discovered that her sister Linda was critically ill following a cardiac arrest.  She had sustained significant brain damage.  ‘Linda’s courage and struggle to recover gave me the guts to get off the treadmill of my high-pressure career,’ Judy writes.   The book is written as a series of letters and emails to Linda as well as extracts from Judy’s personal journal.

Driven by a new sense that time was running out, Judy and her husband retired to France and bought a derelict water mill on the Tarn river - totally uninhabitable - and began to restore it and live their dream.

The memoir reminds me a little of ‘A Year in Provence’ - I could taste the cheese and the wine and share the drama of every catastrophe.  Living without mod-cons stretched Judy to the limit - ‘I learned I can pee in positions unknown to womanhood’.  They had a backhoe in the living room, no bathroom, rising and falling damp, rats, and incompetent builders, but they were reassured by their neighbour that ‘Avec l’argent tout est possible’ (with money anything is possible).  And so it proves.

I got involved with the fortunes of the Blanc family, where Judy goes to learn how to kill a sheep and make duck au confit.  I learned about the process of making Roquefort, the marital difficulties of the local restaurateur, and the plight of Christelle - a mail-order bride from Madagascar imported by one of their workmen -  who consults Judy about his lack of personal hygiene (how do you tell a large Frenchman that he needs a bath?)

Judy learns carpentry, stone masonry and the art of paper-making and discovers her own creativity as well as her husbands.  Before long she is being asked to take part in exhibitions in France and the United States and is setting up fascinating installations. It’s an amazing achievement.  How much personal creativity is wasted in corporate culture?

I enjoyed the glimpse into someone else’s life - the book is honest and well-written.  But it is also, for someone whose views are well to the left, an illustration of what has happened all over Spain, Italy and France, where wealthy colonisers have moved in from outside - Russians, Germans, Scandinavians, English, Americans - and driven prices up beyond the threshold for the local population.  It’s a dilemma - ruinous buildings are rescued and restored, but it often has a negative impact on the local community.  There are both pros and cons.  Judy’s book gave me much food for thought.

Amazon link to Water, Paper, Stone

Kathleen Jones is a poet, novelist and biographer and blogs at www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

You can find her books at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Diving For Pearls - A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, Reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt

by Kathleen B. Jones (the Other Kathleen Jones!)

‘This is the story of my thinking journey with Hannah, a tale at once political and personal, singular and common.  Diving below the surface of her writing, the narrative arches and bends, assembling vignettes about Hannah and me into a collage of life stories, a kind of intellectual and emotional scrapbook.’

That is how Kathleen B. Jones describes her unusual biography.  I read it with great interest - not only because it’s by my American name-sake, a writer, feminist and academic who has often covered similar ground, but also because I've followed the progress of the book on the internet for a couple of years, particularly the fraught process of publication.

Kathleen B. Jones is trained in political theory and a Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies at San Diego University, California.  But these days not even the phrase ‘leading academic’ means that you can get your work published by university presses, and the unusual structure of this book didn’t meet any of the academic norms.  Increasingly, ‘leading academics’ are turning to self-publishing to get their work in front of the public and it’s something to be grateful for.  One of the books I contributed to, published by Ashgate Press, is currently only available at a cover price of £56.00 - You can buy Diving for Pearls for a mere £7.97.

The book had its beginning in personal memoir.  Everyone wants to make sense of their lives, Kathleen B. Jones begins. ‘Some of us do that by telling a story’, but for Jones it was different.  ‘In the dusk of middle age, I chose a peculiar path.  Surprising myself by reversing directions, I took a road I’d abandoned, and found myself exploring again the thinking and life of Hannah Arendt’.

As a young woman, Hannah Arendt (1906-75) was a disciple (and lover) of the pro-Nazi German philosopher Martin Heidegger.  She was a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany to live in America, where she established herself as an eminent contemporary philosopher.  It was a title she often denied, choosing to describe herself instead as a ‘political theorist’.  She became the first female lecturer at Princeton and a fellow at Yale and was the subject of a 2012 film in Germany.

David Strathairn and Melissa Friedman as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt in Kate Fodor’s play ‘Hannah and Martin’.

Her views were often controversial - Arendt wrote a book on the Eichmann trial subtitled ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil’ which criticised Jewish leaders for their actions during the Holocaust and appeared to suggest that the Nazis were not necessarily the monsters of popular thought - they were ordinary people who acquired power and did evil things because they didn’t think enough about what they were doing, and neither did the people who put them in power.  Evil can arise from mere thoughtlessness, unthinking conformity and obedience.  According to Arendt ‘it was “ordinary people,” neither stupid nor necessarily ideologically motivated, who committed the great atrocities of the Holocaust’.

Defining herself as both a German and a Jew, Arendt wrote about identity and human rights. She was very clear-sighted and pragmatic. ‘The right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself.  It is by no means certain whether this is possible’.  But Arendt’s insistence on retaining her German identity, the events of her own life, and particularly her relationship with Heidegger, gave her critics a great deal of fuel for their opposition.  Arendt described love as ‘perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces’.

Arendt was, as Jones points out - ‘A brilliant political philosopher, who refused to call herself a philosopher, a woman who never considered her sex an obstacle in her life, a Jew who was called anti-Semitic, and a rigorous thinker who wrote passionately about hatred and love’.  As a feminist and a writer, Jones found herself fascinated by the apparent contradictions in Arendt’s writing ‘no matter how much I argued against her, I had to admit I admired her writing . . . I found myself circling around and then diving deeper into Arendt’s writing , each time retrieving some pearl of insight, which shifted my understanding and made me reassess my position’.   Hannah Arendt’s voice became particularly insistent when Jones began to write a memoir of her own unusual and complex life.  ‘She wouldn’t leave me alone.  Every time I penned a line bordering on an all too confident assertion, I’d hear her voice in my head.  “Dive deeper, you’re not really thinking,” it said.’

The form of both Jones’ biography of Arendt and her own memoir changed as they merged into one - ‘a disquieting dialogue between two women one long ago dead, about what and how the heart knows yet prefers to keep to itself.  I let my imagination go visiting, entering her life and her work, and began to see the world and my own place in it from an altogether different perspective’.

The result is an unusual book - a thoughtful, penetrating (and sometimes painful) account of a life lived that uses the insights of this life to illuminate that of another. ‘I began to retrieve anecdotes from her life and mine, finding meanings in them I believe are more universal than applied only to my particular case’. What Jones learns from her experience informs her view of Hannah Arendt both as a woman and a philosopher and what Arendt wrote about herself teaches Jones how to think about her own.

One of the things that Jones learned was that the past is not necessarily ‘a set of events determining my present, as if one’s life was fully fashioned at its beginning, as if only time and circumstance were needed to create the equation that produced a person as its inevitable result.’  She abandoned the idea of Fatalism and accepted that a human being must admit their own limitations and ‘accept responsibility’ for what is theirs to control. Human beings are much more than ‘a leaf in the whirlwind of time’.

When Jones re-read Arendt’s book on Eichmann, it made her think ‘about monsters and the hold I’d let them have in my life’.  Reading about Jones’ monsters made me think about mine too and some of the terrible relationships and bad decisions I have had to take responsibility for.  That’s one of the things about this book - it makes you think, as both Jones and Arendt intended.

Jones is also interesting on the bias of the biographer - how we interpret the lives of the people we study according to events in our own.  Someone called Elzbieta Ettinger had previously written about Arendt’s life and used her subject’s relationship with Heidegger to provide the biographer herself ‘with a thinly veiled means of self-laceration, a confession, never made public of ever having become such a man’s prey’.  Ettinger had had a similar relationship.  As biographers we bring our own lives, our own judgements and prejudices to the text.

But there is more - Arendt’s position as an exiled German Jew makes Jones think about our own precarious position in an increasingly unstable world.  ‘We have all become refugees, wandering far from some imagined promised land of our ancestors, searching for a new way to be at home in a world where we might connect with and live with others with whom we have no evident or common ties binding us together as a people, except the shared fact of having been born.’ 

This book is indeed a thinking journey, written in beautiful prose, bringing together two women whose lives have made me think again about my own.  But beware, as Arendt warned, ‘There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity’.

Reviewed by (the English) Kathleen Jones

whose website you can find at http://www.kathleenjones.co.uk

You can find more about Kathleen B. Jones on her website here.

And you can buy Diving for Pearls on Amazon.co.uk

And in Paperback

And from Amazon.com

The Bookie’s Runner by Brendan Gisby

Review by Bill Kirton

Revisiting the past in order to learn its lessons is a familiar theme. In this book, the author's explicit about his aim. He's recreating a single bus ride to his school after the holidays, the ride which will take him to his first day in fourth year. And there, he'll have to smile and laugh and be `normal' even though his dad has just died. In the course of the ride, he recalls memories and puts them together to capture his dad's essence, to try to find out who he was and, in the process, make the same discovery about himself.

So we have a mature writer `regressing' to his early teenage self, who becomes the narrator. The bus journey is lived in the present tense, with him dredging up and mixing the memories to give the life he's lived thus far a shape, putting people in their places in the story, ascribing blame, seeing patterns. Above all, he's resurrecting his dad and at the same time forcing himself, more or less successfully, not to cry.

The Bookie's Runner is a short book but it has a compelling density that anchors it in those seemingly insignificant little details of which reality is made. Most of the memories about his dad begin with a gesture, a few words spoken, a look. Each then opens out into an episode which encapsulates one or more of the characteristics which define the man for him. The time and the setting are carefully recreated, but without artifice, and the reader's drawn into the narrative by the occasional image that's recalled then shaken off without being explained for fear that it'll make the tears start flowing. There's the sight of his dad `sliding down the living room door and dissolving into tears' or splashing in the sea wearing blue knickers or lying grey-faced in the hospital bed. They're all explained in the course of the narrative but, when they're first mentioned, they simply intrigue, tease and draw you onwards.

Then there are the strangely vituperative moments when he rails against his mother for borrowing more and more to keep up appearances. `Sure, mum, we had an immaculate house and proper school uniforms and nice clothes to wear in the chapel on Sunday but didn't you realise that we couldn't afford those things? Didn't it occur to you that we didn't really need them? Didn't it dawn on you that the clothes and the furniture and carpets were all bought on tick and would have to be paid for one day?' And there's also `the unspoken business of mum carrying on with other men'. It underlines an irony the author noted earlier when he wrote that his parents' marriage was `a match made in heaven. Theirs will be a fairy-tale marriage. They'll produce beautiful children and live happily ever after. Aye, if only...'

And yet, if this is giving the impression that this is yet another `misery memoir', that's false. Because there's life here, and laughs. OK, working class life for a couple with six kids to raise was hard, but there's a strength in their community that isn't found so easily in our more sheltered society. And, despite seeing how badly his dad was treated, how people, including his wife, took advantage of his gentleness, his trust, the man's personality is strong and he found pleasures in his life. This was the meek, gentle man who, when bullied by a Petty Officer, poured a pot of soup over him.

As the bus nears the narrator's school, the tears come at last, provoked by incidents in his dad's final days. It's the book's climax and it centres around his death and two specific events related to it which seem to sum up the man. I don't intend this to be a spoiler so one of them you'll have to read for yourself. The narrator tells us he wept `Tears devoid of bitterness. Tears of sorrow. The sorrow not for me, but for the man who had never won; the man who was destined to lose. They robbed him before he died, and they robbed him after he died.'

But then, as this `loser' is carried to the cemetery for burial, `suddenly they're there: hundreds upon hundreds of mourners, lining both sides of the road, cramming the little lane that leads up to the cemetery gates, filling the cemetery itself. It's as if the whole town has come to say goodbye to dad. It's a measure of the love that people have for him - for their Derry McKay, for a son of the Ferry.

And there's another way the father has quietly won the battle, too. The narrator's final claim is that he's learned from his father's story that `I'll be happy to forego the multitude at my graveside and my heavenly reward in order to live a better life than yours [...] I won't ever be gentle and trusting. I've learned from your errors.' And yet the narrative is threaded through with tenderness, empathy, an affective sensitivity and that tendency to tears. They do all suggest that, after all, he's his father's son."